Captain Future 10 - Outlaws of the Moon (Spring 1942) Read Free Page A

Future chuckled.
    “Those little pests wouldn’t miss you in a century, as long as their automatic feeding mechanism here kept functioning.
    “That’s not so,” Grag said indignantly. “Eek gets lonely when —”
    A bell rang sharply across the laboratory. Curt Newton stiffened at the sound.
    “That’s the ship-detector’s alarm!” he exclaimed to the Brain.
    He strode toward a tall mechanism in a corner, whose front was a panel of telltale dials. It was an ingenious device long ago installed by the Futuremen to give warning of any spaceship that approached the Moon. Curt studied the intensity and directional dials with keen eyes. They indicated by an aura-effect, just where upon the Moon any ship landed.
    “It shows two ships landing inside Great North Chasm, over on the other side of the Moon,” Curt said, puzzled. “Now why in the world would any ship land there? Nothing’s there but those old Lunarian ruins.”
    “Maybe some space pirates have planted a secret base there in the months we’ve been gone,” suggested the Brain. “Remember, they tried it a couple of times before on this planet, and we had to run them out.”
    Curt nodded worriedly.
    “I suppose we’ll have to go over and look into it. Dang it, just when we’ve got home —”
    “It’s always the way,” grunted Grag disappointedly. “Whenever we figure to get a rest, trouble raises its ugly head.”
    They were soon scudding back across the barren surface of the Moon in the Comet . They shot westward into the blaze of its sunlit face. Far ahead, the jagged white peaks around Thorson Crater towered against the black, star-dusted sky. Over the tremendous crater, the largest on the Moon, raced the ship of the Futuremen.
    Upon the baking white desert beyond, the long black line of Great North Chasm extended east toward the Dragon Sea. Within a few minutes, the ship crossed above the rim of the gigantic canyon. The Futuremen peered down into its black maw. Far down in the tenebrous darkness, Captain Future saw a little cluster of lights.
    “There’s some kind of base down in here, all right,” he said. “Funny, I’d have thought space pirates too superstitious about the North Chasm to use it as a secret base.”
    He started the Comet in a rapid descent into the black depths.
    “Better stand by the proton guns,” he said rapidly over his shoulder to Grag and Otho.
    The depths of the chasm were a gloomy contrast to the sun-baked desert above. Sunlight never penetrated here, and only the thin starlight that sifted into the abyss showed the towering walls of jagged rock rising on either side.
    Long ago when the Moon was young, the convulsive contraction of its cooling sphere had caused this gigantic split in its crust. This was the largest of the countless fissures and cavernous spaces that honeycombed the satellite, but strong superstition clung to the monster crack.
    “We’re near the bottom — eighteen miles down,” called Otho after a glance at the altimeter. “Say, look at that dome down there!”
    “That isn’t any pirate base,” said the Brain sharply. “It’s too big for that.”
    Curt Newton was amazedly surveying the scene below. He was staggered by the magnitude of the activity on the chasm’s floor.
    The canyon floor, forty miles in breadth from cliff to cliff, lay in freezing darkness that only the starlight faintly relieved. A few miles to the west vaguely glimmered the mysterious white ruins of ancient lunar civilization, which had invested this place with so many legends.
    Enigmatic remnants of a perished race who long ago had inhabited the young Moon! What had they been like, those Lunarians of long ago? No one knew, now. It was believed that as their world withered, they had retreated into this great canyon, in which air might still have lingered, and had died here. Curt had more than once explored these puzzling ruins.
    But now a little world of new life had sprung into being on the chasm floor near the